Friday, April 30, 2010

Who’s to Blame When a Black Man Rapes a Woman? by Melissa Clouthier

...A criminal wouldn’t be a criminal if he were loved more and society supported him, therefore it’s society’s fault that he is committing the fill-in-the-blank crime.

So who is to blame, then, when a black man rapes a woman? Would it be the rapist? No.

What follows is the harrowing and cognitively dissonant account of a woman’s rape at the hands of a black man she considered a friend. Her name is Amanda Kijera and here is her story:

Two weeks ago, on a Monday morning, I started to write what I thought was a very clever editorial about violence against women in Haiti. The case, I believed, was being overstated by women’s organizations in need of additional resources. Ever committed to preserving the dignity of black men in a world which constantly stereotypes them as violent savages, I viewed this writing as yet one more opportunity to fight “the man” on behalf of my brothers. That night, before I could finish the piece, I was held on a rooftop in Haiti and raped repeatedly by one of the very men who I had spent the bulk of my life advocating for.

It hurt. The experience was almost more than I could bear. I begged him to stop. Afraid he would kill me, I pleaded with him to honor my commitment to Haiti, to him as a brother in the mutual struggle for an end to our common oppression, but to no avail. He didn’t care that I was a Malcolm X scholar. He told me to shut up, and then slapped me in the face. Overpowered, I gave up fighting halfway through the night.

She continues:

Truly, I have witnessed as a journalist and human rights advocate the many injustices inflicted upon black men in this world. The pain, trauma and rage born of exploitation are terrors that I have grappled with every day of my life. They make one want to strike back, to fight rabidly for what is left of their personal dignity in the wake of such things. Black men have every right to the anger they feel in response to their position in the global hierarchy, but their anger is misdirected.

Women are not the source of their oppression; oppressive policies and the as-yet unaddressed white patriarchy which still dominates the global stage are. Because women — and particularly women of color — are forced to bear the brunt of the black male response to the black male plight, the international community and those nations who have benefited from the oppression of colonized peoples have a responsibility to provide women with the protection that they need.

Here we have the root of a mindset that enables perpetrators and their apologists. They rail against racism and at the same time feel entitled to victimize others because of THEIR race. They believe that they have it worse than others and thus should not be expected to even try to make an honest living or obey the basic norms that separate us from savages. No wonder the prison populations are not ethnically proportional to society at large. And they cite that as evidence of racism as well.

Culture gives us our values. If you are not expected to earn what you have and are told that you are entitled to take what belongs to others because their race proves that what they have was in fact stolen from you -- including, apparently, a woman's body -- you are a sociopath. You are also a Loser. The victim culture has been breeding several generations of people who are as harmful to themselves as they are pathogenic to society.